Understanding Human Trafficking Origin: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis

<title>Abstract</title> Feminist work on global human trafficking has highlighted the conceptual difficulty of differentiating between trafficking and migration. This contribution uses a cross-country United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs dataset on human trafficking from 2006 to empirically evaluate the socioeconomic characteristics of high-trafficking origin countries and compare them with patterns that have emerged in the literature on migration. In particular, the authors ask how and how much per capita income and gender inequality matter in shaping patterns of human trafficking. Ordinal logit regressions corrected for sample selection bias show that trafficking has an inverse U-shaped relationship with income per capita, and, controlling for income per capita, trafficking is more likely in countries with higher shares of female-to-male income. These results suggest strong parallels between patterns of trafficking and migration and lead the authors to believe that trafficking cannot be addressed without addressing the drivers of migration.